1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to mobile computing systems and, more particularly, to management and update for data and applications in mobile computing systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, many resources have been invested in the automation of back office and front office processes. For example, large sums of money have been spent on developing and purchasing sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Although many organizations found the systems burdensome to implement and difficult to integrate with existing legacy data systems, many companies realized significant savings and efficiencies. These improvements helped contribute to widespread technology-led productivity increases.
The office process automation efforts have typically been focused on many customer-critical processes, where an organization interfaces with customers, but the efforts have largely stopped at the company front door. More recently, many organizations are striving to bring the benefits of automation to the least automated segments of their workforce: their mobile employees. These workers play a major role in a customer's perception of an organization. Currently, the extent of automation and enforced business processes for such workers has been limited to mobile computing devices such as pagers and cell phones.
Mobile computing can provide substantial benefits for an information-driven enterprise that has field staff who meet customers. For example, field staff productivity can be radically increased, and critical business processes such as ordering and service scheduling can be dramatically accelerated, by providing field staff with mobile computing devices. Many enterprises who are early adopters of such mobile computing systems have discovered that these benefits often come with a substantial cost. Some of the major difficulties faced by adopters of mobile platforms involve integration with other data in the enterprise.
Enterprise data integration issues can arise because mobile applications often come in proprietary, closed architectures that impede integration with other data systems of the enterprise. For example, data in the enterprise might be maintained in four or five different sources. Some of the data sources include CRM systems, dispatch systems, ERP systems, and financial records systems. Each of these data sources can utilize a different data architecture, format, and protocol. The data being stored and the configuration of the data and access mechanisms are constantly changing. Many mobile computing systems create an interim datastore in which data from the various sources in the enterprise is collected. In this way, data from the different enterprise data sources, each with a different data architecture and format, can be collected in a single common database. The mobile users can access the enterprise data by accessing the interim datastore, rather than the actual enterprise data sources. The interim store, however, creates data update and conflict issues of its own. Synchronization operations and other safeguards must be performed frequently, to ensure that the data in the interim datastore is a faithful copy of the data in the enterprise data sources.
In the context of data updates, the “data” can involve the mobile applications that are installed at the client devices. It is important to maintain the installed applications with updates, just as it is important to maintain the application data with current values.
It is important for mobile users to have an efficient, reliable data and application update methodology on which they can rely. The update process should not place a severe burden on the communications channels of the mobile devices, but must be capable of providing current data in a timely manner. Satisfying these requirements is complicated by the fact that mobile users can be limited by intermittent access to network data sources and typically use mobile devices with relatively modest computational power.
As a result of these difficulties and increased complexity, there is renewed emphasis on requiring mobile applications to be fully integrated with other applications and data, and to have greater functional capabilities. The present invention satisfies these needs.